From Tarek at Liquid List.
War on Iran
The Looming Storm
It’s still dark at noon, there’s a massive, scary and possibly global-warming-driven gale blowing up outside and the BBC is reporting that US troops are already attacking euphemistically described ‘Iranian interests’ along the Iran/Iraq border.
American soldiers have already raided an Iranian diplomatic mission. It seems even the inviolability of embassies is fair game now. Le Loi? C’est Bush. Game on.
Massive troop surges, attacks on diplomatic missions, naval strike groups in the Gulf, a change of peskily obstructive generals – it’s clear that, as I’ve always said, megalomaniac midget George Bush is is planning to nuke Iran. The only question is when.
There’s depression and then there’s despair and this news, although expected, is tipping me towards the latter. It’s tempting to take a mental health day, to go back to bed and sleep it all away, but what good would that do? It’d still be there when I woke up.
No, Bush really is riding into his longed-for Armageddon with his eyes wide shut and nothing and no-one seems able to stop him, not even his own father – or maybe especially not his own father. Famously he’s said he’ll carry on to ‘victory’, whatever that is, even if only Laura and the dog support him – he’s even willing to fire his own officers, who, if they gainsay the boy emperor, are swiftly replaced with biddable fundy automatons.
He’s also promised a ‘cataclysmic fight to the death‘ should Congress attempt to oppose or depose him; indeed he’s already divorced one of his office wives in order to get lawyered up for the fray by hiring a veteran Watergate defence counsel.
Maybe I’m hoping for too much too soon, given the time differences, but there’s a very strange yet pregnant lull in the public conversation on the subject of Bush’s speech last night, as though people are hoping this is all not really happening. Some discuss Bush’s odd and apparently drug-fuelled affect and there is much weary outrage, but the overall tone, from the left blogs at least, seems to be despairing resignation .
Wingnut bloggers, as one would expect, are creaming their pants at the anticipation of an onscreen bloodbath.
The major US media outlets in general (though with a couple of honourable exceptions) appear to be supinely accepting this further invasion and the latest pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation, as though sending more young people to die and destroying yet another country are perfectly valid and acceptable options. There are no questions asked about legality or even morality – the issues just don’t arise for them.
It’s as though, faced with what GB has said time and time again and in no uncertain terms – that he intends to have his own way on Iraq whatever anyone says – the nation has just collectively thrown up its hands and gone “Oh, whatever. Look, over there, Al Qaeda! Sexy airstrikes in Somalia!”
Americans can’t keep on acting alternately as though either a] this is a movie they can switch on and off at will or b] wringing their hands that it’s all those evil Republicans fault and not their responsibilty and that they’ve been hijacked by some shadowy neocon cabal and “it’s nothing to do with me, man, I voted for Gore. “
Every minute they and their elected representatives allow this administration to continue to flout the country’s own constitution and international law. every US citizen becomes more complicit, whether they opposed the war, voted against Bush or not.
Let’s face it, if America really wanted rid of him, they’d’ve read the Declaration of Independence :
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers
in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness””
and then marched on DC with metaphorical pitchforks long since. It’s their sons and dusghters that’ll be dying after all.
But no, because of national self-interest and greed the citizenry have shirked their responsibility to their nation and the world. This vain and self-obsessed psychopath and his plan for a Middle East in nuclear flames is the result.
The Responsibility by Peter Appleton
I am the man who gives the word,
If it should come, to use the Bomb.
I am the man who spreads the word
From him to them if it should come.
I am the man who gets the word
From him who spreads the word from him.
I am the man who drops the Bomb
If ordered by the one who’s heard
From him who merely spreads the word
The first one gives if it should come.
I am the man who loads the Bomb
That he must drop should orders come
From him who gets the word passed on
By one who waits to hear from him.
I am the man who makes the Bomb
That he must load for him to drop
If told by one who gets the word
From one who passes it from him.
I am the man who fills the till,
Who pays the tax, who foots the bill
That guarantees the Bomb he makes
For him to load for him to drop
If orders come from one who gets
The word passed on to him by one
Who waits to hear it from the man
Who gives the word to use the Bomb.
I am the man behind it all
I am the one responsible.
Read more: Iraq, Iran, War, Nuclear bombs, Surge, Bush, Responsibilty, War poetry
Don’t Be Fooled By Cuddly Dave
It’s hard not to like UK Conservative party leader David Cameron. On the face of it he’s a very nice man: clever, personable, young; an iPod-loving, soaps-watching Head Boy who appeals to grandmas and skateboarders alike.
Call-me-Dave smiles a lot, his wife is pretty, he makes all the right cuddly noises, he talks about caring and sharing and children and the internet and the NHS and his disabled son and is swiftly becoming what many of his antediluvian colleagues would call ‘the housewives choice’.
Under Cameron the outward, media-facing aspect of the Tories has changed drastically – these days they even have a British Asian (I’ll leave others to dispute which of those descriptors takes precedence) party vice-chair.
This and their more principled, dare we even say liberal, stands on torture and civil liberties have won them many admirers amongst the non-aligned and Labour-loathers alike, as have Cameron’s own carefully calibrated public statements on Blair’s Iraq excursion.
He’s good on his feet too: even I’ve caught myself egging him on against Blair at Prime Minister’s Question Time. (video)
So far, so according to plan:
Party bosses want people to recognise, approve of and ultimately buy the Cameron brand first.
They will then glue that branding all over the old Conservative Party and, so, transform it into something the public will like and vote for again. It’s called brand extension in the trade.
All this niceness and market manipulation has led the Tories to poll consistently higher than Labour when voters are asked which party they’d vote for in a Cameron v Brown contest, something that common wisdom would’ve formerly have dismissed. But apparently the Tories are no longer percieved as the Nasty Party – indeed they’ve become so nice that some of their more rabid shire Tories have decamped to UKIP.
Not bad work for a lightweight former PR man.
But is there really change? Is Cuddly Dave just the palatable froth on top of the same old poisonous brew of Thatcherite free marketeers, neocon wannabes and bigoted Little Englanders as before?
In short, is Cameron lipstick on a pig?
Let’s look at foreign policy. The Tory party is as hawkish, belligerent and in thrall to the illusory ‘special relationship as they ever were. Doesn’t really square with the new emollient Cameron image, does it?
Tories back US action on Iran
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
Published: 10 January 2007
Liam Fox, the shadow Defence Secretary, has backed hawks in the White House by calling for “nothing to be ruled out” to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Mr Fox gave the clearest signal yet that the Conservatives would support military action, including the use of nuclear strikes by the US or Israel, to halt the alleged production of a nuclear weapon by Iran.
“I am a hawk on Iran,” said Mr Fox. “We should rule absolutely nothing out when it comes to Iran.
“They are notoriously good poker players and it is a very high stakes game they are playing.”
His remarks follow reports in the USthat Israel is ready to use nuclear “bunker buster” bombs to knock out the Iranian nuclear plants.
But let’s give Cuddly Dave the benefit of the doubt rather than immediately cry hypocrisy. Maybe Liam Fox is a just a loose cannon. Maybe the disconnect between public utterances and policy means Cameron has lost control over his his historically backstabbing party’s policy and shadow cabinet (if he ever had it) and they’re all going off half-cocked in the media.
But no. There is no disconnect on policy and no difference between Fox’ and Cameron’s foreign policy views.
Neoconnery is Conservative party policy and Cameron policy too according to Dr Brendan Simms of the Henry Jackson Society , who ought to know it when he sees it:
[…]
His close allies and contemporaries, the new shadow minister for housing, Michael Gove, his shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, and Ed Vaizey all describe themselves as neoconservatives.
The new shadow cabinet is a clear sign of the way the wind is blowing on foreign and security policy. Some Conservative leaning observers had wondered whether Cameron might resile to classic foreign-policy “realists”, such as the sometime foreign ministers Sir Malcolm Rifkind, and Lord Hurd. Both of them had strongly opposed the Iraq war. In fact, Cameron recalled the former conservative leader William Hague – who was and remains an unyielding supporter of the war – to the front bench as shadow foreign secretary. Rifkind thereupon resigned his shadow post as work and pensions secretary in a huff.
In terms of the American party-political spectrum, all this places Cameron well to the “right” of most Democrats and many Republicans, who have gone cold on the Iraq war, but well to the “left” of the President himself. The closest match with Cameron is probably Senator McCain, whose staunch support for the democratic transformation of Iraq, and principled stand against torture makes him the least bland of American politicians. By contrast, the Democratic mainstream, and even its left-liberal grass roots, is now firmly “realist” in its scepticism about the democratic transformation of the Middle East. This means that if the British Labour Party goes the way of the Democrats, which is by no means certain, the best hope for progressives in foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic will be on the (party-political) right.
Anyone who votes Tory in the coming local, Scots and NI Assembly elections on the grounds that they’re not Labour and Cameron isn’t Brown is being wilfully blind. All the obfuscatory talk in the media – that the Conservatives have no policies yet, that Cameron is a nice man but an unknown quantity – it’s all PR spin meant to mask the Tories’ real agenda.
Cameron is no cipher. He’s a known quantity; a rightwing libertarian hawk who is committed to the same imperialistic, ‘freedom’-spreading principles as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and all the other architects of the destruction of Iraq and promoters of worldwide cultural war.
Cameron’s not the lipstick on the pig, he’s the pig’s lips.
Read more: UK politics, Tory party, David Cameron, Local elections, Neocons, Middle East, Iraq, Iran
That was then, this is now
